Marc Malkin

Summit Entertainment

Oh...my...God!

P2 is one very twisted movie. It’s violent, gory and terrifying. In other words, it's a success!

Rachel Nichols stars in the new thriller, which opens today, as an overworked executive who, on Christmas Eve, is kidnapped by an obsessive stalker, a parking garage attendant  in her office building played by American Beauty’s Wes Bentley.

This is a far cry from Nichols’ very first job in the business. She was the gal in the legendary Sex and the City episode who gets shoved out of bed by Samantha (Kim Cattrall) during a three-way with Samantha’s boyfriend.

Nichols gets a lot more than a shove in P2. First, there were the handcuffs used to hold her in place during many scenes. “They were digging into my arms, and I got bruises all over,” she told me the other day when I sat down with her and Bentley at the Beverly Regent Hotel. “I had bruises that they actually had to cover, because I was too bruised.”

That wasn’t even the worst of it. “I had bruises on my legs, and I was losing the skin off my feet,” said Nichols, 27. “It was so nauseating. We hated these parts of the movie when we were doing it. But it makes the movie so much better. It makes it real.”

Bentley cracked, “It’s fun to cause pain.”

Nichols has had some real-life experiences with obsessive stalking. However, she admits she was the one who was doing the stalking.

Okay, she was only in sixth grade at the time, and her victim was in eighth. Nichols remembered with a laugh, “I used to follow him home from school and jump in the bushes.”

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she fessed up, when the two met face-to-face for the first time during a chance meeting in Los Angeles. “He was like, ‘God, I wish I had known,’” Nichols said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t so cute back then.’”

Bentley added with a little grin, “There were girls I wished would have liked me.”

Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com

Next up for Nichols is Charlie Wilson's War, the upcoming Oscar-buzzing movie starring Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks and directed by Mike Nichols. The actress admits that her role is “extremely tiny,” but that gave her time to get to know Roberts' kids.

“I totally babysat for her,” she joked.

Bentley will next be seen opposite Winona Ryder in The Last Word, in which he plays a man who helps people write their suicide notes. “It was actually the most draining role I’ve ever had,” Bentley said. "It took the life out of me. I got sick for the first time on a film...It’s a funny film, but I’m not the funny guy.”